The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), placed
aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in February 1997,
provides a unique opportunity to search for very low mass
stars, including brown dwarfs, out to a great distance from
the Sun. When STIS is operated in parallel with other
cameras on board HST, it takes deep images and slitless
spectra of a field a few arcminutes from the primary target.
In a 2000 second exposure, good S/N can be achieved for
stars as faint as m_V=28 in the imaging mode and
m_V=22 in the spectral mode. The spectra have a
wavelength range 5200 to 10300Åand a resolution of
\sim5Å\ per pixel, well suited for identification of low
mass stars using their molecular absorption features, and do
not suffer from telluric absorption.

Preliminary investigation and analysis of STIS parallels
have yielded many low mass star candidates. Approximately
100 low and 500 high galactic latitude fields have been
taken since the start of the STIS parallel survey; it is
expected that one extreme low mass star candidate will be
found in every five low latitude fields, and one in every
100 high latitude fields. If this is borne out, STIS will
provide a great deal of information about the extreme low
mass end of the luminosity function and the distribution of
such stars in the local galactic disk and halo.